A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan (29 page)

Man and machine were not in harmony at Wattisham. Fog's disenchantment encapsulated a wider problem in the Armed Forces identified in a report published in November 2007 by Demos, the left-wing think tank. 'Stretched budgets remain tied up in big-ticket, high-profile hardware,' the report stated, 'while the "software" – the men and women who make up the armed forces – are overlooked.'

Unlike in the RAF, Army Air Corps pilots are drawn from noncommissioned ranks as well as officers, an egalitarian arrangement that represents an unusual opportunity for NCOs. For ambitious officers, however, the conversion to Apaches is not necessarily attractive. 'An officer has a career path to follow,' said Fog. 'He's got to jump through the hoops if he wants promotion. But if he goes Apache, he's already lost a year on basic helicopter training, then another year converting to type and role. And if he misses the chance he'll be left behind.'

Fog might not have liked the Apache pilot's lifestyle, but the clincher, for him, was his disillusionment with the conduct of Britain's Afghan campaign. Like the rest of the squadron, he had spent a lot of time hovering in 'overwatch' above the district centres. The Apache crews' perspective on all the destruction was unique, and none of it, in Fog's opinion, should ever have happened. 'The platoon-houses only had to be occupied because the Afghans legged it,' he said, 'and that left no one to secure the golden triangle. It was never planned for, and it put all the reconstruction work on a backburner. We certainly should have found a way of sticking with the original plan.'

He had flown many missions during Herrick 4, including Operation Augustus, but the one that summed up his tour came earlier, on 24 May, when he was tasked to escort two Chinooks full of Paras to Baghran in the far north of the province. Their orders were to rescue the local police chief, Hajji Zainokhan, whose town had supposedly been overrun by the Taliban. Zainokhan was yet another 'key ally' of Governor Daoud, who had effectively ordered the mission through Charlie Knaggs, the designated British Task Force commander in Helmand. Although simple in theory, the mission nearly went badly wrong. Baghran was at the helicopters' maximum range from Bastion, and required a quick turnaround if everyone was to get back without running out of fuel. The police chief had been instructed to light a smoky fire as a landing beacon as soon as he heard the British coming. Yet there was no sign of any fire when the helicopters arrived over Baghran. 'We circled for what seemed like ages, biting our fingernails and wondering whether to abort,' said Fog. 'They lit a fire eventually, but only just in time.'

Hajji Zainokhan's lack of urgency was typically Afghan. Did he need rescuing, or not? The Paras and pilots had put their lives on the line for him! There was a sorry symbolism to the story, and Fog's frustration was clear. 'In my opinion it was incidents like that that caused the Task Force to become so spread out. What I'm saying is, we bent over backwards to keep the Afghans satisfied, and I'm not sure that we should have.'

His squadron, he feared, would suffer in the end. The eventual price would be Apaches flown into combat by crews without the necessary experience – or even, God forbid, £38 million war machines grounded in Suffolk for want of anyone qualified to fly them.

7
Tom's War

In mid-October 2006 the BBC correspondent David Loyn set out for Helmand to meet the Taliban. Herrick 4 was drawing to a close by then, and the fighting was beginning to subside, although the platoon-houses at Now Zad and Sangin were still under sporadic attack. Only Musa Qala was quiet, thanks to an experimental ceasefire that had held for almost a month. Loyn joined a band of fighters who took him on a tour of northern Helmand in a convoy of speeding trucks, apparently with complete impunity. At one of their bases the Taliban were seen showing off some captured Coalition equipment: a machine-gun in a wheelbarrow, an American helmet which they had fired at in order to test it, and, most memorably, a pair of night vision goggles that one fighter struggled to put on over his enormous black turban.

The report, broadcast on
Newsnight
, generated much controversy. Some accused Loyn of giving succour to the enemy. The Conservative defence spokesman Liam Fox called the piece 'obscene'. On the other hand, soldiers quite liked it. In a poll on the Army Rumour Service website, 62 per cent of respondents agreed unconditionally with the question 'Is it right for the BBC to interview members of the Taliban?' A former intelligence analyst for the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in Bosnia, an ex-Fusilier officer who called himself 'Stonker', wrote, 'I was always happy to read-hear-watch interviews with tw-ts [
sic
] like Arkan;
^*15
because (taken with a pinch of salt, and in conjunction with material from other sources) it was a "way in" to their world view, which was advantageous.'

Perhaps the most troubling shot was of a military vehicle lying mangled at the side of a road just outside Musa Qala, the white-on-black British number plate 04 FF 31 plainly visible – 'a Spartan', Loyn commented, 'destroyed with the loss of three lives'. During the trip, Loyn was offered some grainy video footage of what his hosts said were members of the vehicle's unfortunate crew: a pair of corpses, badly burned, swinging by the neck from a Musa Qala lamp-post. The claim seemed plausible. The Taliban had a tradition of hanging their trophy victims in public – President Najibullah in Kabul, for instance, when they deposed him in 1996. But the pictures were too gory to use in the package that Loyn was preparing for
Newsnight
, even if he had been able to verify the identities of the victims.

This was just as well, because whoever the unfortunate people were they were certainly not British. Loyn had almost fallen foul of a crude propaganda trick. Three people – 2nd Lieutenant Ralph Johnson, Lance Corporal Ross Nicholls and Captain Alex Eida of 7 Para RHA – had indeed died in the Spartan, a vehicle operated by the Household Cavalry (HCR), which had been ambushed ten weeks earlier. But immediately after the strike, and as a matter of policy, the Paras led a counter-attack to recover their remains. Some of the body parts were pulled from the wreckage by Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal himself. The sole survivor of the blast, the driver, Trooper Martyn Compton, had already been rescued by fellow patrol members.

I heard the details of the ambush from my wife's cousin, Tom Burne, who was there when it happened. His squadron was taking part in Operation Nakhod, which was intended to relieve a platoon of Pathfinders holed up in the Musa Qala platoon-house. Some of his unit reckoned the Taliban had simply been lucky, although the attack looked to him like the work of experts. The bombers had anticipated the lead troop's route and sited an IED (improvised explosive device) to perfection, well buried in a choke point between a high wall and an orchard in the southern outskirts of the town. They allowed the first vehicle in the troop, Call Sign 31, to pass over the spot before halting it with a pair of well-aimed RPGs. The second vehicle, the Spartan, Call Sign 40, stopped and began to reverse – as the ambushers apparently guessed it would. They undoubtedly knew what they were doing. The Spartan, a command and control version of the Scimitar, was the only one in the four-strong troop and easily distinguishable because it carries no 30mm cannon. The IED, probably comprising two or even three Soviet-era anti-tank mines stacked one on top of the other, was powerful enough to blow the back off the eight-ton vehicle.

Tom was commanding another Spartan, Major Alex Dick's Squadron HQ vehicle, about half a mile to the rear when he heard the tremendous bang. The initial contact at the head of the formation had been reported by Corporal of Horse Mick Flynn, who was in command of the lead Scimitar. Unfortunately the pressel on his hand-held radio unit had become stuck on permanent send (the pressels were badly designed, and prone to this). For what felt like minutes, therefore, all Dick could hear was Flynn's instructions to his crew, so he could only guess what was going on at the front of his column.

'You train for this situation but there's no preparation for what it's really like,' said Tom. 'The waiting is the worst. You have to sit and wait and let whoever's been contacted get on with the situation in hand.'

But then they heard from Lieutenant Tom Long, who had taken command at the ambush site and was looking on from one vehicle back. His words sent an awful frisson through everyone who heard them. 'Call Sign Four Zero does not exist,' he said.

The men in Dick's Spartan looked at one another. And then they all looked at Bombardier 'Fitz' Fitzgerald, who had been riding in the back. Fitz was Alex Eida's 'ack' – his number two. Eida himself was a forward observation officer (FOO) responsible for coordinating the fire from six 105mm guns which had been brought up to provide supporting fire for the operation. FOOs and their acks, whose battlefield role is dependent on excellent communication, tended to be close, and the pair had already been through a lot on this operation. Twelve hours earlier they had been riding in a third Spartan when it was struck by an old Russian mine on a ridge just west of the town. There wasn't much the squadron could do about these so-called 'legacy' mines, of which there were an estimated four million scattered about the country, the majority of them unmarked. 'Everywhere we went,' said Tom, 'whenever we recce'd a position we thought was good, the Russians had had the same idea and mined everything around it to protect themselves.' The blast obliterated the engine decks and threw the vehicle into the air, turning it 180 degrees. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. The Spartan's driver, Trooper Jason Glasgow, simply stood up in the driver's cab, touched his body up and down to check everything was in place, did up his body armour and popped a couple of pain-killers. The vehicle's commander, Corporal of Horse 'JC' Moses, was so relieved that he stood up in his turret and went into a war dance.

Now, Eida's luck had run out. The crew and passengers from the disabled Spartan had been redistributed around the squadron – which was why Fitzgerald had been separated from his boss, who was now almost certainly dead. 'It was awful,' said Tom. 'You could see it in Fitz's eyes. But he was focused on his job. We were debussed and he was on the net to the guns in the rear, calling in target grid references. He was incredibly professional; but once he had done all he could, after five or six minutes, he started crying. He just cracked.'

It was a grim moment for all of them. This was the first large armoured vehicle the British had lost in Afghanistan. Until now the eighty-nine men of D Squadron, a forward reconnaissance formation of about twenty-five vehicles, had felt almost invincible behind their armour, secure in the knowledge that they were the biggest thing out there. The vehicles even seemed to offer good protection from mine strike. Musa Qala had just stripped this happy illusion away.

Ralph Johnson's death was particularly shocking for Tom and the other young lieutenants. 'He was in the intake below me,' Tom said. 'He was still a second lieutenant, he'd come straight from training, but he was a key part of the young officer gang as there were only ten or twelve of us. He was a very unassuming guy, very chilled out, a good lad. His dad had been in the South African Army. He was a top-quality soldier. His boys thought the world of him because he was doing everything right, and highly professional. They were absolutely gutted. They were getting close to him because of his competence. He was one of the boys, loving it.'

For Tom there was the added realization that he was the first in line to replace him. Although a qualified troop leader, he had originally been deployed to Helmand in a liaison officer role, which was why he had spent the first three weeks of his tour in the relative safety of Bastion. Now that there were only four troop leaders left in theatre, it was just a question of time before he stepped into the front line.

The death toll of three could easily have been worse. The ambush had blocked the narrow road with burning wreckage, cutting off the lead Scimitar from the rest of the squadron. The commander, Corporal of Horse 'Mad Mick' Flynn, forty-six, from Cardiff, was a regimental legend. He had fought in the Falklands and won a Conspicuous Gallantry Cross (CGC) before quitting the Army, but had found civilian life so dull that he joined up again after an eight-year gap. Now, he decided to try to force his way back through the ambush. The site was swarming with gunmen, with a main killing group of twenty or thirty who were no more than ten metres away. Flynn fired phosphorus grenades at them, taking out the machine-gun posts to the front and killing three others as they assaulted up the lane. But the wreckage on the road had forced Flynn's Scimitar into a ditch, and when a third RPG struck, setting the machine alight and mangling its outer bar armour, it was clear it could go no further. Flynn and his crew dismounted and fought their way along the ditch to the relative safety of the nearest Scimitar, Call Sign 30 under Tom Long, passing the wreckage of the bombed Spartan as they went. 'Inside I could see one body,' said Flynn. 'The one outside was blown up and was just a mass of meat. It was just another dead body. Without trying to sound callous, I don't have any feelings. I think I have become immune to it. You can't – they are finished, that's it. I just accept that they are dead . . . My driver was having problems and I said, "We have to move, otherwise they are going to kill us."'

While this was going on, Long saw something out of the corner of his eye: a pair of legs poking out from behind a low wall. 'At first I thought he must be Taliban. But then I saw the trousers were desert DPM [disruptive pattern material]. He was one of ours.' It was the driver, Trooper Compton, who had somehow escaped the carnage of Call Sign 40. Horrifically burned, he had scrambled from the wreck and run into cover about twenty-five metres away, where he had then been shot. The fire-fight was still intense but Long's driver, Lance Corporal Andrew Radford, didn't hesitate. He scrambled out and sprinted through the ambush site towards Compton, where he was joined by Flynn. 'I could see it was one of the lads,' said Flynn. 'When I first looked at him he had fish eyes and I thought he was dead, but as I moved his leg, which was jutting out at an angle, he screamed.' Flynn heaved Compton on to Radford's back and they staggered back, shooting as they went. Compton, unconscious now, was dumped on to the front decks of Call Sign 30, which then reversed out of the fire-fight as quickly as Radford could manage. Compton's life was saved. Radford was later awarded the CGC. Flynn already had one of those, so he was awarded a Military Cross – which, as his squadron leader proudly pointed out, made him the most decorated serving soldier in the entire British Army.